ECUADOR UNVEILS “KANUA” IN THE CANALS OF VENICE
In the run-up to the Venice Biennale, the Ecuador Pavilion project offers solar-powered boat tours and intimate conversations about extractivism, rivers, territories, and ways of life in the Amazon.
As the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia opens on May 9, Ecuador has unveiled Kanua: listening practices, a public program that forms part of the country’s participation in the 2026 Venice Biennale. Developed by the anticolonial film collective Tawna in collaboration with the Kara Solar Foundation, the project transforms Venice’s canals into a temporary space for dialogue around memory, sovereignty, extraction, and territorial resistance.
Curated by Manuela Moscoso, the initiative takes place today, May 8, and consists of six boat journeys lasting between 45 minutes and one hour. Each ride brings together a small group of participants alongside members of Tawna and invited guests to discuss themes such as aqua-feminism, grief, political space, archives, and forms of knowledge that exceed institutional structures.
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Pabellón de Ecuador 2026
The project builds on Kanua, Tawna’s floating Amazonian film festival in Ecuador, which brought cinema and cultural exchange to remote communities aboard a solar-powered boat. In Venice, that experience is reactivated within another territory equally shaped by water, commerce, and environmental fragility.
Founded in 2017 by activists, filmmakers, and members of Sápara and Kichwa communities, Tawna works through Amazonian visual narratives and collaborative practices of territorial self-representation. For the collective, the boat becomes “a platform for encounter, listening, and the circulation of stories.”
Invited participants include Carolina Caycedo, Mariana Castillo Deball, Tabita Rezaire, Chus Martínez, and La Chola Poblete, among other international artists, curators, and researchers.
The public program is part of Ecuador’s broader pavilion proposal, which brings together Tawna and Oscar Santillán in a reflection on Andean and Amazonian histories, human and non-human worlds, and forms of existence shaped by memory, land, and ancestral presences.
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